Sofia Brandt decided to cooperate.
I do not know the exact arithmetic of that decision β how much was conscience, how much was counsel, how much was the simple weight of a video recording that no performance could outlast. I only know that when she sat down with investigators and gave her statement, she stopped performing calm, and what came out instead was an account of method.
Adrian, she said, had set the goal. The statue had to be made unusable for comparison. That was the requirement as he expressed it β a condition problem, a piece removed from clean examination before Grace Nolan's report could be finished and published.
He had not specified how.
That distinction mattered to her, and I believe it was true, because it was exactly Adrian Vale's way. Needs, not instructions. Problems, not methods. A man could describe the precise shape of the hole he wanted in the world and still claim, with clean hands, that he had never mentioned digging.
The method, Sofia told them, was hers.
At first she had considered something simpler: an accident. Statues fall. Weather, a weakened base, a delivery mishap. But an accident invites conservators. Accidents get restored, examined, documented β more examined than before, if anything. An accident would have put my statue under brighter lights, not dimmer ones.
What the goal required was not merely damage. It required a story attached to the damage β a story in which I destroyed the piece myself, in anger, after learning it might be a reproduction. An owner-smashing story. That kind of damage does not get a comparative report published. It gets a paragraph in the news and a permanent smell of fraud around anything the object ever said.
And so she had built the story the way she built her professional work. In photographs. In stages.
She admitted the draft. Investigators found it where drafts live, unsent, in her own account: an anonymous message addressed to me, informing me that the museum had concluded its review and my statue was a reproduction β that I had wasted serious people's time on a garden ornament. It was meant to arrive shortly before the destruction, so that when the police looked at a furious man standing over a broken statue, they would find a motive already warm.
She never sent it.
"Why not?" the detective asked her, and Sofia's answer was the one sentence in her whole statement that sounded like a professional speaking in her own language. Too much trail. An anonymous email is not anonymous once anyone looks properly. It would point somewhere. Words could be traced; a grieving man's anger, she believed, could not.
So she kept the rest of the plan and cut the email loose.
The rest went like this, in her own account, which matched the camera under my eave in every particular the camera could see.
Photograph the property first β the garden, the gate, and through the garage window, the tools, including the orange mallet on the second shelf. Buy its twin. On the morning: enter alone. Place the duplicate where it would later be found. Break the statue with a tool of her own, a tool that would leave the garden with her in her tote. Set the duplicate beside the fragments like a signature. Telephone the number she was expected to telephone. Then call the police, and be standing ready as the witness β the calm stranger who had seen the owner do it, who had the photographs to prove it, who had watched a volatile man take a mallet to the thing he could not sell as genuine.
Break it. Plant the tool. Photograph his anger. Call the police. Claim witness.
Then let everyone else finish the story on their own, the way people do. Owner learns statue may be fake. Owner rages. Owner destroys. The museum, the experts, the comparative report β all of it recedes into a footnote about a sad little scandal in a Savannah garden.
It nearly worked, in the sense that for some number of minutes at my own front gate, with her photographs on an officer's screen and her voice steady in the morning air, it was working. I have not forgotten that. The plan was not stupid. It was built by someone who understood exactly how first impressions harden into conclusions, and how rarely conclusions get revisited once they fit a man's face in a photograph.
What it did not account for was a small camera tucked under an eave, recording the garden she thought she owned for eleven unwitnessed minutes.
And it did not account for this: a story that requires the victim to be told his treasure is fake β a story whose first step had been drafted in an email she was too careful to send β had been built, from the beginning, around an authentication she and Adrian Vale were privately terrified was real.
Grace Nolan was about to explain to me precisely why.